Many companies are now allowing their customers to remotely access their computer systems. These companies believe that the providing of such access will give the company an advantage over their competitors. For example, they believe that a customer may be more likely to order from a company that provides computer systems through which that customer can submit and then track their orders. The applications for these computer systems may have been developed by the companies specially to provide information or services that the customers can remotely access, or the applications may have been used internally by the companies and are now being made available to the customers. For example, a company may have previously used an application internally to identify an optimum configuration for equipment that is to be delivered to a particular customer's site. By making such an application available to the customer, the customer is able to identify the optimum configuration themselves based on their current requirements, which may not be necessarily known to the company. The rapid growth of the Internet and its ease of use has helped to spur making such remote access available to customers.
Because of the substantial benefits from providing such remote access, companies often find that various groups within the company undertake independent efforts to provide their customers with access to their applications. As a result, a company may find that these groups may have used very different and incompatible logic models. For example, one application may be based on a request-response logic model, and another application may be a legacy system that performs processing of data provided in a file. A company may want to provide the functionality of both applications to its customers through a single and consistent user interface so that these applications appear to the customers as a single “overall application.” It may, however, be very difficult, time consuming, and error prone to combine the functionality of both applications into a single application. It would thus be desirable to have a technique that would allow applications that use disparate logic models to provide the appearance of a single overall application.